The official twitter for /r/IAmA - reddit's Ask Me Anything subreddit.
California, USA
Joined March 2012
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reddit AMA retweeted
Yeah, there will be no pivot to the center. This is what you get when you have an 80-year-old president who doesn't really gaf about the future of the Republican Party.
reddit AMA retweeted
OK, wrote about the models vs. prediction markets debate. Actually, the real stolen valor is from NYT/Siena. But prediction markets converged toward FLIPR/model prices, not the other way around, and the models got to the right answer sooner and more confidently.
reddit AMA retweeted
The betting markets lagged the high quality models in forecasting a blue wave the ENTIRE cycle.
The way we judged forecasts at FiveThirtyEight was based on the accuracy of its output *each day* it was live. Not just the morning of the election.
Kalshi thinks you are dumb.
reddit AMA retweeted
Give me a break, the polls and models provided the direction in contast to vibes and dumb insiders. And yes it's good that traders were smart enough to trust them. But the better election models were more confident about the outcome than the markets and got there more quickly.
Last night, the power to decide what America sees changed hands.
I have spent a ton of time in DC over the last few months. The elites were certain the markets were off. I heard many variants of “no chance markets are right about X” and “I’ve been in politics for a decade. ‘These people’ don’t really know much.”
Last night, ‘these people’ beat the elites.
Prediction market favorites won 479 of the first 487 races. That’s 98%.
The elites live in a bubble. They theorize, write, ideate, and mistake credentials for an understanding of lives they’ve never lived. They don’t see and feel what the everyday man, on the ground, sees and feels.
Knowledge is not exclusive to the elites but scattered across millions of people.
Someone knows their hometown better than any national pundit. Someone has followed a local race passionately for months. Someone has followed a local race dispassionately for months. Someone notices a shift in their community before it makes the headlines. Someone is shaped by an incident at work. Someone is shaped by what’s getting harder or easier for their families.
Each holds a piece of the picture that no expert can see in full.
And for the longest time, that knowledge had no way to reach the rest of the world.
For generations, election night meant turning on the TV and waiting for a handful of people to tell you what happened.
Prediction markets change that.
You don't need a title, a large following, or an editor to publish you. All you need is a perspective and the conviction to back it.
That changes who holds power over information.
Anyone can see the market. Anyone can contribute to it. Anyone can question it. No title gives you the final word. No gatekeepers can filter your view.
Sometimes the signal can be wrong. But anyone can challenge the consensus and improve it.
And when people consolidate their knowledge together, something remarkable happens: millions of individual perspectives become a signal that we all can learn from.
Over the last few months, the people showed up on Kalshi to tell the world what they were going to do.
Last night, the megaphone was passed to them.
reddit AMA retweeted
Want to be clear that in 2024 Elon was so sure he was a political mastermind everyone loved he felt confident enough to do a winky nazi salute twice on national television, and then since then he totally failed in his role in the White House, lost a wisconsin special election, burned half a billion dollars losing the midterms, and is now pretending he never said anything all. What a massive downfall
reddit AMA retweeted
Host: Why are you here this morning?
Trump rally attendee: In the '70s I was too young to get go to South America for the Jonestown massacre, so this is as close as I'll get. There's nothing like seeing a cult up close.
Host: Alright, maybe this is not a Trump supporter
reddit AMA retweeted
Many are (confusingly) referring to record-breaking CA coastal water levels as arising from "king tides" despite only moderate astronomical influence. Instead, main culprit is local sea rise from extreme El Niño event! Actual Nov-Jan king tides will bring *greater* inundation.
reddit AMA retweeted
This chart is insane. This shows Russia's casualties over time compared to Russia's territorial gains in Ukraine over the last five years.
No sane or rational person would say continuing the war to try and take more of Ukraine's territory is worth the casualties.
reddit AMA retweeted
CONCLUSION 🧵(1/2): Putin would have the world, and especially the United States, believe that he is somehow holding back from crushing Ukraine, but that he could do so at any moment of his choosing. The opposite is the case.
If Putin had had a way of ending the war quickly, he surely would have used it. The effort to field an army large enough to make virtually no gains is costing Putin a fortune, driving up inflation in Russia, and generating increasing social discontent. Fielding a larger army would cost more with no guarantee of materially changing the situation on the front. That is why Putin is holding back at least for now. ⬇️
Putin has likely recognized the folly of trying to drown Ukraine in Russian blood and has instead opted to try to hammer Ukraine into submission with a strategic bombing campaign. The Russians have secured a temporary advantage in the skies over Ukraine through their jet-powered drones and the shortage of Patriot missiles that can intercept their ballistic missiles. But Ukraine is fielding solutions to defend against the jet-powered drones, and it is hardening and decentralizing its infrastructure to survive the ballistic missile strikes (as well as developing its own ballistic missile interceptors, although that effort will take time).
The Russian strikes are currently devastating Ukrainian energy and other infrastructure and imposing a brutal cost on Ukrainian civilians—as Putin intends. But there is no reason to think that this strategic bombing campaign will be any more successful than every other strategic bombing campaign in history—all of which have failed to compel a country holding its own on the battlefield to surrender.
It is unclear whether Putin is lying about Russian gains or being lied to by his own military—or both. Russian military correspondents constantly complain of what they call “beautiful reports” that Russian military units send to higher headquarters, claiming gains they have not made. Ukrainian forces say that they have been able to use the Russian military’s own internal culture of lying to their advantage, luring Russian troops into traps because the Russians think that they are moving through territory they control. Leaked Russian military maps show phantom gains, often matching Putin’s claims. The pervasive lying within the Russian military is a problem for Russian soldiers, but likely an advantage for Putin, as it supports his own efforts to present Russian forces as advancing and winning when, in fact, they are doing neither.
reddit AMA retweeted
This is more evidence for Congress, which can easily determine if Ukraine violated any terms of service. It also constitutes a tacit admission by Musk that he played a part — if not the central role — in throttling Starlink.
reddit AMA retweeted
MORE: Putin is trying once again to breathe life into the myth of inevitable Russian military victory in order to persuade the United States and other supporters of Ukraine to compel Kyiv to surrender. Putin constantly asserts that Russian forces are making gains along the entire frontline. He makes claims of territorial gains so far from reality as to be fantasy. He hearkens back to the Soviet Union and the Red Army to evoke images of Soviet hordes overrunning the German Wehrmacht. But these claims, images, and maps of supposed Russian gains are all fictional. Reality is quite the opposite.
SPECIAL REPORT: Russian military victory over Ukraine is not inevitable. It is extraordinarily unlikely, in fact, unless Western support for Ukraine collapses.
There is simply no inevitable correlation between the relative size of combatants and the outcome of a war — particularly when the war is existential for the smaller state but not for the larger one, as is true today.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is nevertheless trying once again to breathe life into the myth of inevitable Russian military victory in order to persuade the United States and other supporters of Ukraine to compel Kyiv to surrender.
Ukraine, not Russia, has actually held the initiative in key sectors of the frontline for much of the year and has developed a number of ways of offsetting the overall Russian manpower advantage.
Russia’s population and relative (but diminishing) wealth will let Putin continue his war for a long time, to be sure. But Ukraine can also continue fighting for its existence as long as Western support continues.
reddit AMA retweeted
Should be evidence for any congressional inquiries into what happened with Starshield. If Musk is throttling a Pentagon-run defense network, which was commissioned to work in a partner nation as a matter of U.S. policy, because of his own political bias or desire to sway the midterms he’s heavily invested in (see his subsequent tweet), then he represents a national security risk. I’d argue he represents that anyway.
reddit AMA retweeted
SPECIAL REPORT: Russian military victory over Ukraine is not inevitable. It is extraordinarily unlikely, in fact, unless Western support for Ukraine collapses.
There is simply no inevitable correlation between the relative size of combatants and the outcome of a war — particularly when the war is existential for the smaller state but not for the larger one, as is true today.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is nevertheless trying once again to breathe life into the myth of inevitable Russian military victory in order to persuade the United States and other supporters of Ukraine to compel Kyiv to surrender.
Ukraine, not Russia, has actually held the initiative in key sectors of the frontline for much of the year and has developed a number of ways of offsetting the overall Russian manpower advantage.
Russia’s population and relative (but diminishing) wealth will let Putin continue his war for a long time, to be sure. But Ukraine can also continue fighting for its existence as long as Western support continues.